Awkwardness, the bugs in your body and Twinkling satellites: ESOF16 Day 2

The second day of a conference is when things start to get awkward.

On the first day, with your misguided sense of exuberance and nervous energy, you try to meet everyone. You insert your ready-to-be-shaken hand into circles of people like a knife in a birthday cake. (This is also the day when most people contract that strange foreign illness they invariably take home and share with their nearest and dearest.)

By day two, the weariness has started to settle behind your eyes, your jaded opinions of the world have returned, and you do not remember a single name of the dozens upon dozens of people you threw yourself at the day before.

Enough time has also passed – and accumulated shared experience as you continue bump into each other – that you’re too embarrassed to say you don’t know their name. You play the dangerous game of trying to force an encounter between two people whose names you don’t know in the hope that they’ll introduce themselves.

What this invariably means is that, if you’re me, you start to avoid people in order to circumvent almost-certain social awkwardness. The good news is that, if this happens at a science conference, there’s great research to hear about instead.

For example, did you know that 1.5kg of your body mass is bacteria? This “poorly understood micro-ecosystem in our bodies is fundamentally important in almost every aspect of our physiology”, said Eran Elinav, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. “Almost any large-scale multi-factoral disease has been linked to our microbiome.”

This is particularly true for obesity, a global pandemic that grew slowly in front of our eyes over the last century. In 2014, according to World Health Organisation figures, there were 1.9-billion overweight adults on the planet, and 600-million of those were obese. Obesity has also been linked to many other diseases, including diabetes, heart disease and a number of cancers.

Despite knowing the extent of the problems, it is incredibly difficult to lose weight for many, many, many reasons.

Elinav pointed to the fact that many of our diets are based on the idea of nutritional grading systems (calories, glycemic index (GI)), and then diets are contructed around these systems. GI is a measure of the effect foods have on the amount of sugar in your food. You can read more about it here. The long and the short of it, according to traditional wisdom: high GI = bad (because the food you eat is converted quickly to glucose, your blood turns into (figurative) syrup and it isn’t good for you). Low GI = good (because then your food is absorbed slowly over time, releasing glucose in manageable doses).***

And here was the first shock to my system (it did what the bad conference coffee had failed to achieve): by testing of thousands of people, Elinav found that the GI system held true for the average, it was not true for the individual.

Upon eating a certain food and then being monitored: “Some [people] spike to near diabetic levels, others don’t,” Elinav said. But statistics give us the average, which smooths out these extremes.

But how does that links to micro-organisms in our gut? “The microbiome was the biggest feature to determine the body’s response to food,” he said.

“It makes no sense [to use this index] because each of us has a different response to food. In our opinion, based on these results, a one-size fits all diet cannot be effective.”

Since our genetics and microbiomes are all different, that makes sense, neh? That said, there are some thing all diets agree on: moderate exercise, less sugar, smaller portions.

Unfortunately, “moderation” and “balance” are seldom the words people want to hear when it comes to a silver bullet for a pandemic.

There is something that science funders like to hear, though, and that is “small” and “cheap”. And that is what the Twinkle Space Mission plans to offer: a small, low-cost satellite, which aims to analyse planets when it is launched into low-earth orbit in 2018.

It feels as though everyone is trying to “push the boundaries” these days: the biggest, the smallest, the fastest, the whatever-est, how far we can see, how small we can cut. While this technological drive is great, there is a lot of important and exciting science to be done with the technology we already have. I mean, that’s why we developed it, isn’t it?

*** I fact-checked this with the fantastic Anina Mumm from SciBraai and she says it would be better to say it like this:

GI is a measure of how quickly the sugars in foods are absorbed into your bloodstream. You can read more about it here.

High GI foods can be bad because the sugars are so simple that they are absorbed into your bloodstream very quickly i.e. they spike your blood sugar, which can contribute to quicker fat storage if you don’t need all of the energy contained in the sugar right away. Spikes also lead to crashes in blood sugars soon after eating, which causes cravings for more sugar, leading to a cycle that fuels obesity. Over the long term, high blood sugars put strain on the body’s insulin response, which may lead to type 2 diabetes.

Low GI foods are considered healthier because the sugars therein are complex and take longer to break down, thus getting absorbed into your bloodstream slower and providing sustained energy over a longer time rather than in one quick burst – that’s the “fuller for longer” idea.

The fine print: I am at ESOF16 thanks to a Nature Travel Grant, and my accommodation is covered by the SKA Organisation.

Sarah Wild is a multiaward-winning science journalist. She studied physics, electronics and English literature at Rhodes University in an effort to make herself unemployable. It didn't work and she now writes about particle physics, cosmology and everything in between.
Sarah was the science editor for both Business Day and the Mail & Guardian before moving on to WildOnScience, and the world of freelance writing and training.
In 2012 she published her first full-length non-fiction book, Searching African Skies: The Square Kilometre Array and South Africa's Quest to Hear the Songs of the Stars.
In 2015 she published her second non-fiction book, Innovation: Shaping South Africa through Science.